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Category Archives: Predictions

On Nintendo

2 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on April 30, 2013

I’m a Nintendo fan. Now, don’t read that as me saying I’m a Nintendo fanboy. I like to think I’m not a fanboy of anything, though I proudly proclaim to be an anti-fanboy towards certain things. Like many, a lot of my gaming history and literacy was formed on Nintendo platforms. I didn’t start gaming on the NES but I owned one and loved it to death, as I did the Super Nintendo. Both of these systems are the subject of many a Retro Flashback. I skipped the N64, got back in on the GameCube which I quite liked and own a Wii and a Wii U which I also really enjoy. The company’s history is varied and fascinating, having began over 100 years ago as a playing card manufacturer before evolving into the household gaming name they are today. They have brought a ton of innovation to the industry and take risks where others fear to tread. It’s safe to say without hyperbole that a lot of what the game industry has evolved into today can be traced back and credited to Nintendo.

The last couple of years, all has not been rosy however. After attaining stratospheric levels of success with the Wii and the DS–the latter of which is the best selling dedicated gaming system of all time–they’ve been on a pretty rocky path. They just recently reported their first yearly loss ever (remember, they’re 100+ years old), their stock has dropped substantially (though they are still one of Japan’s biggest companies), 3DS sales have picked up nicely after a very poor launch but are below expectations and the Wii U is doing very badly at the moment. More than a few in the press and in the “professional” analyst field have been decrying the company’s failures, saying Nintendo doesn’t know how to compete in the modern games industry, that they can’t sustain a hardware business and just need to start making games for already oversaturated and teetering mobile platforms. This culminated in last week’s announcement that they are not going to be holding a press conference at E3, instead holding media specific events and running a number of their Nintendo Direct streams, most of which are aimed at core fans. Indeed, many say the end is nigh for this gaming juggernaut.

Certainly, their challenges are many but a lot of this can be tied into the press needing something to write about in the void between now and E3 and their insistence that there always be someone to hate. It used to be Sony. They certainly provided a lot of fodder for that during the early years of the PlayStation 3 but with that company seemingly firing on all cylinders these days, Nintendo has come under the hateful gaze of the “enthusiast” press. There’s certainly a lot of valid criticism and many lessons that Nintendo has yet to learn. However, I do think a lot of this sentiment–which has gotten downright vitriolic at times–is uninformed and misplaced.

There are many reasons for that and I’m going to outline them here, just to give you readers some perspective when you’re reading all the doom and gloom on this company.

The first is the kind of company Nintendo are in general. In a business world that has become transfixed in the next quarter at all costs, Nintendo has always taken a long view. They don’t do things just for the next quarter, they build things to succeed over years. Some of their systems have launched strong, others not so much but with the notable exception of the Virtual Boy, every game system they’ve released has made money and often, done so while not being the top dog. The N64 was a distant second to the PlayStation 1, the GameCube was a distant third place last generation, at least in North America. Yet both of these systems were profitable in the end, even when Nintendo themselves called their sales disappointing. That’s because they managed to get good games on them which generated momentum and drove a steady curve upwards. The modern business market doesn’t like this. They like companies that come roaring out of the gate and leap from hit to hit, until they miss once and then they drop them like a hot potato.

The market wants everyone to be like Apple (something even Apple themselves are starting to falter at) and that’s not realistic. While Sony and Microsoft lose buckets of money for years at a time on their hardware launches, Nintendo quietly sits back with their often underpowered machines, slowly letting them grow and grow and usually, turning a profit on day one. The Wii was a huge exception to this rule but it was a fluke, one even Nintendo themselves didn’t see coming. The DS started slow and nearly everyone (chief among them the press) called it a ridiculous gimmick that would never catch on. How did that turn out? Companies that take a slower and steadier approach don’t make for exciting market narratives but Nintendo has stuck to this methodology in spite of that because it works. It’s one of their greatest strengths, not a weakness.

The Wii U has been a big exception to a lot of what I wrote above. The system apparently doesn’t make money on the hardware but Reggie Fils-Aime has claimed that the royalties from one game sale put it in the black. I actually think the system launched with a decent line-up but most of the games were met with a tepid response and while there does appear to be some good stuff in the pipe, they’re being drip-fed and the lack of information (even with E3 coming soon) is a big misstep. People who bought them want games and those who didn’t buy them need a reason to. Every day without more games is another day they give Sony and Microsoft the chance to steal their thunder.

They also completely bungled the message for the system. Naming it anything but the Wii 2 was a huge flub and even company President Satoru Iwata stated that a lot of people think the Wii U is just an accessory for the original Wii, an error you can’t fault anyone for making. The thing is, they can still fix that with good games, primarily from their internal teams. Nintendo has some of the best game developers in the industry and on top of that, they’re led by management that is not only skilled but who actually like and play games. Yes, Nintendo does need to court and nurture both indie and big third-party developers alike but their in-house talent always make games that both sell and show off whatever hardware they’re put on.

The games will come and I think as always, the Wii U will find success. Wii level of success? DS level of success? Absolutely not. But I have no doubt that Nintendo is aware that those days are over. The 3DS has a similarly difficult launch and then as well, many in the press said the era of dedicated handhelds were over and that the public had “moved on” to mobile games wholesale. Similarly, the games came and now the 3DS is doing very well. Now those same press types who should be eating crow are instead shifting their doom and gloom to the Wii U. The cycle continues.

Then there’s Nintendo skipping their E3 press conference this year. Many are saying that’s an admission of defeat and that they are conceding that nothing they show will be able to get any attention versus the big new console announcements Sony and Microsoft have. That was my initial reaction too. Then I thought about it for a bit and realised that I think most people are looking at this the wrong way.

I don’t think Nintendo dropping their E3 press conference says as much about them as it says about E3 itself and how important it really is to them. I said before that the press needs to stop whining about E3′s relevance and to a degree, I still believe that. But think about this for a minute. Sony and Microsoft aren’t announcing their new consoles at E3. They will certainly have a lot to show and talk about but Sony announced the PS4 months ago and Microsoft is announcing the next Xbox in May. These guys aren’t announcing at E3 either, they’re doing targeted, focused events dedicated to that separate from the press conferences. And that’s exactly what Nintendo’s doing. Many people (press included strangely) are acting as if that by not holding a press conference, Nintendo is essentially bowing out of E3 and that couldn’t be further from the truth. They still have a booth, they’re still showing tons of stuff to the press and sure, their Nintendo Direct presentations are watched more by the core than by casual consumers but the core is who ultimately spreads the message for you.

Nintendo knows that them showing games for a system that’s already out won’t get covered on Good Morning America like new systems from Sony and Microsoft will. Press conferences are expensive and rather than spend a fortune on what is frankly, usually a cringe-worthy show anyway, they’re going to spend less and speak directly to the press and their most evangelical fans. They’ll probably get the same amount of exposure at worst but they get to control how much information gets out and they get to do it for a lot less money. I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty damn sensible to me. And lest we forget, Nintendo’s not the only big industry player backing off at E3 this year. I still think E3′s important but Nintendo not doing a press conference says far more about the show than it does about them.

My point with all this is simple in the end: There’s a reason the phrase “Never bet against Nintendo” was coined and I think it still applies to this day. Yes, they’re a company facing difficulties right now but they’ve faced plenty before. They have an extraordinary management team of actual enthusiast gamers, they have some of the most valuable IP and developer talent in the world, they know how to make hardware and despite the fact that they seem to not always pay attention to the industry around them, they are still a humble company that’s learning from their mistakes. I say all this as someone who beat them with a stick about Wii U Virtual Console pricing. They aren’t perfect but they have consistently demonstrated that they can find a way to survive and thrive. For all the companies that have come and gone in the hardware space, Nintendo has been there and personally, I think if this upcoming console generation is the last as many will predict, Nintendo will still find a way to survive in it, even when Microsoft and Sony have left the building. That their business strategy doesn’t jive with the way most of the market wants things to work these days is in my opinion, a failing of the market, not Nintendo. I think more companies should take a long view approach to things and that the current market’s obsession with pump and dump strategies will backfire one day soon.

I admit that I do sound like a bit of a fanboy with how strongly I seem to be defending the company here. Don’t get me wrong, I think they’ve made and continue to make a lot of mistakes and as someone who got a Wii U right near launch, I want games and I want them now. But in their burning desire to always have something to hate on, the press and the analysts who want little more then attention have set their sights on Nintendo, ignoring their history of overcoming virtually all challenges and being a driving force in the games industry, even as those who beat them in the short term crumble and fade away. Dumping hardware and jumping into the mobile gold rush bubble is modern business thinking but doing so would be a long term disaster for Nintendo and in a few years, the same people telling them to do that now would be back deriding them for it. I think this is a company that not only has a lot of lessons to teach about the video game industry but about how to run a business for the long term in general. They may be the target du jour but I think their wisdom is ignored at our own peril.

Don’t count Nintendo out until they’re out. They can still surprise us all.

Business, Coverage, Predictions, Video Games 3DS, E3, Nintendo, predictions, video game industry, video games, Wii U

The EApocalypse

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on March 8, 2013

Man, it’s been a shit year for Electronic Arts so far hasn’t it? Rarely in the good graces of gamers at the best of times, the world’s second largest publisher (and once the largest by a country mile) has just been drowning in controversy in 2013. Between the microtransactions in Dead Space 3 to the continuing fustercluck that is the launch of SimCity with its always-on DRM, the company is just swimming in bad PR and furious customers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s reaping what it’s sown and it deserves all the ire that it’s getting. Never before have I seen a company so Hell bent on going to war with its own customers and expecting to come out the other side smelling of roses and money…alright, maybe Zynga.

The thing about this though is that is really doesn’t have to be this way. EA doesn’t have to be this way. What’s going on down in Redwood Shores?

I am generally not a fan of big business and the way it tends to treat its customers and this is the case in the video game industry as well. Big publishers love to push the bounds of unreasonableness to see just how much gamers are willing to take. It drives me nuts, as it does to constantly see the argument trotted out that businesses exist to make money and therefore whatever they do in the interests of that is OK because it’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s bullshit. You know how businesses make money? By building a loyal base of customers, not driving them away. Without your customers, your business has no money. I mean, duh? If you are a CEO who thinks the needs of your short-sighted shareholders should trump the needs of the customers who actually generate value for those shareholders, you are doing it wrong.

At the same time, I do understand the plight of these companies and even sympathise with it to a degree. Like it or not, big publishers are important to a large segment of gaming. Those big, expensive AAA titles we all like so much? Big publishers need to exist and thrive for those to get made. A couple of bedroom programmers aren’t going to make Battlefield. Kickstarter isn’t going to fund the next Mass Effect. You can’t make a Dead Space experience for a few grand and sell it for 99 cents. Millions of people want these games and big companies are how they get produced. The games industry is a tremendously risky one, regardless of the level you’re trying to compete in and we live in a world where people want everything right now, they want it to be better than last time and they want it either free or as close to free as possible. It’s an almost untenable situation and is at odds with the very core of how some of the best interactive experiences have been created. As a whole, the industry doesn’t know how to handle it yet.

Some companies are handling it much better than others and they’ve done it by being focused on what they’re good at and catering to it while trying to push forward in their chosen space. For all of Ubisoft’s faults, I think they’re a great example of this. While they’ve dabbled into other facets of gaming such as mobile and social, their focus has remained hardcore AAA titles with another segment dedicated to family and casual games, almost all on consoles and PC. They’ve also managed to do this and continue experimenting and iterating on even their biggest money making franchises. They’re not necessarily raking it in but they’re weathering the current storm the game industry is in much better than most. I think THQ may have ended up in a similar position had they been able to hang on longer. I’ll talk more about Ubisoft’s philosophy in a future post but I use it here to demonstrate the stark contrast with EA.

For many years dating back to the 90s, EA was seen as the evil boogeyman of the game industry. They grew their fat wallets by releasing full priced updates to sports titles every year that were little more than roster updates and they were famous for buying studios that ran on creativity and running them, their people and their franchises into the ground. They frequently released games that were overpromised, buggy and often outright broken without supporting them properly. They drew near constant hate from gamers everywhere but always had their stable of sports franchises to tide them over. And time went on and game production costs rose, this formula waned and the EA money train began to slow.

Enter current CEO John Riccitiello. Fresh off of selling the powerhouse studio combo of BioWare/Pandemic to EA for a ginormous pile of money, he took charge of the company as a whole and came in with lofty ambitions to reverse their fortunes. His words were music to the ears of gamers. He said EA’s quality was poor, that there was no originality in their games and that a wave of new creativity and business models to go with it were necessary if EA and indeed the publishing industry as a whole were to survive and grow. He planned to completely reform not only EA but the entire idea of what a video game publisher was about and he was going to do it by trimming the fat and focusing on quality and new ideas. It all sounded great and for the most part, none of it’s come true. I won’t spend another 1,500 words detailing all the Riccitiello ambitions that haven’t come to fruition. I link to Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition series a lot but he often does a great job illustrating points I want to make better than I could. Check out his Why Do People Hate EA? episode to see just how badly EA has flubbed what sounded like a fantastic vision that John Riccitiello entered with.

The company has gone from one that wanted to embrace new ideas to trying to throw its seed into every pot available in the hope that something will take root. In the last few years, they’ve gone on another acquisition bender, buying up several prominent companies in the mobile, social and casual game spaces, all for ludicrously inflated prices. And almost none of them have panned out. They bought the companies when they were hot and just like the EA of the past, they were either left to stagnate or were interfered and meddled with to the point where their uniqueness and creative soul were drained from them and they didn’t bare the results desired. They did initially put a lot of effort into new IP and franchises but after a couple of these didn’t work out because not everything’s a sure bet, they got scared and retreated back to stagnant safety.

The only semi-new things we see from EA any more are their constant, desperate attempts to chase after what’s hot at the time. Not being able to make Battlefield a yearly series, they’ve been desperate to find something to compete with Call of Duty and that’s led to the largely dreadful attempts to reboot Medal of Honor, recently shelved after the piss poor latest title in that series. Hungry for a piece of the World of Warcraft pie, they poured an estimated $200 million into developing Star Wars: The Old Republic, an immensely ambitious effort to make the Star Wars MMO everyone wanted. Except they just made it exactly like WoW with a Star Wars skin and no one cared. The game was a flop and cost the company a fortune. Rather than understand that CoD and WoW are juggernaut outliers and that they should focus on building their own ideas rather than go head-to-head with those, they tried to latch on to their success and failed miserably. EA went from being a company with a bold desire to chart its own course to one wildly flailing its arms around, hoping that it would hit something, anything that would prove to be a cash cow as big as the two Activision tripped over.

When none of those things worked out, EA doubled down on mobile games and core console titles. Except rather than try to make unique and appealing experiences in those arenas, it just made all of its franchises an indistinct sludge with no single amazing thing you could point at them for, all in the interests of “broader appeal”. They took Dead Space, one of the only horror games I liked and turned it into an action series with multiplayer no one asked for in the second game and co-op no one asked for in the third one. They padded the third with a ton of boring side missions, bloating it to a ridiculous, unnecessary size. On top of all that, they stuffed Zynga-esque microtransactions in, shoving the option to artificially buy progress for real money into your face every time you opened a crafting bench. Never mind that the previous two games made money by selling less copies and having no microtransactions. Rather than look inward and figure out why their costs got so bloated and rein them in to keep the game focused and the sales requirements reasonable, they basically threatened fans by saying it had to sell an obscene number of copies to justify its existence. Let’s not also forget how what many consider critical story elements were cut out of Dead Space 3 as well as Mass Effect 3 to be sold later as DLC.

Then we have the new SimCity, a game that with its very name alone would have been a money press. Of course, that wasn’t good enough. They crammed it to the seams with always-on DRM, made the city size laughably small and piled on half-baked social features that were forced on players in order to drive engagement through overexposure (i.e. how most Facebook games work) and sell people DLC. No one asked for any of this, gamers weren’t cramming for smaller cities and forced social integration. We all just wanted a new SimCity but now we have an online-only game that as of this writing, doesn’t work.

To me, the new SimCity embodies a near perfect representation of the modern EA: A company who is desperately trying to be a jack of all gaming trades and is not just a master of none but not even competent at any of them. It treats its paying customer as adversaries and not allies, a relationship that’s poisonous to everyone. The company is acting completely contrary to the incredible vision that John Riccitiello came in with and I think that’s so sad. Reverting back to their old ways hasn’t helped either. They lost hundreds of millions over the last few years and are only just barely clinging to profit right now. Their financial future is far from certain, even with the stable of hits they do have.

Had he been able to execute his ideas the way he expressed them to fans, I think it could have been an amazing thing, a creative and business revolution in an industry that desperately needs both right now. Why has this vision rotted away so badly? Did Riccitiello just lose faith in his own ideas? Were EA’s shareholders just too clueless and short-sighted to give him the time necessary to do it? Given that he hasn’t yet been ousted from his position as CEO (though there have been rumbling of this before), they obviously mustn’t think he’s doing that bad a job. I really don’t want to hate EA. I don’t want to hate any publisher. I think competition is good and the more people that make games, the better we as gamers are. I also love the big AAA franchises and want to see more and better ones get produced but the way EA is doing things right now is not sustainable. They need focus and clarity, they need to pick an area of gaming and put all hands on it. They need to let creators create for a while and be willing to take some risks. And most of all, they need to stop treating customers as cash machines and start rewarding their loyalty and make them feel welcome. This all sounds so basic but it’s apparently too hard for the average shareholder to comprehend.

I don’t know how they’ll do it but EA needs to tell the market to sit down and shut up for a while because only happy customers who want to spend money with you will generate long-term growth. People are only willing to be fleeced for so long before they’ll move on and then you have nothing. SimCity could be the tipping point for a lot of people and the lessons it is giving are ones that should be burned into the minds of not only EA but their competitors who think that their model is the right one to follow. EA needs a revolution and if not that, a major correction. It’s time to let one of those happen.

Business, Predictions, Video Games DRM, EA, Electronic Arts, microtransactions, SimCity, video game industry, video games

We’re Not Entitled to Backwards Compatibility…Sort Of

2 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on March 1, 2013

So as everyone on Earth knows by now, the initial reveal of the PlayStation 4 took place last week. It’s been discussed to death already and I don’t have a ton more to add except that a) I was stunned by how much Sony didn’t screw this presentation up as they so love to do and b) the complaints about them not showing the physical hardware are dumb because it’s just a black box you’ll put under your TV and never look at anyway. If you want to hear more, I appeared on an episode of my buddy Chris Cesarano’s Downloathable Content podcast and we had a great discussion about the whole thing. I went into the event kind of expecting Sony to bomb it and came out actually pretty excited for the PlayStation 4.

The one subject Sony dodged during the show and only got on record about after was whether the PS4 would be backwards compatible with the PS3. Since the two systems are so vastly different under the hood (they are less apples to oranges and more apples to dragonfruit), I didn’t expect the PS4 to be able to play PS3 retail games. With Sony’s acquisition of Gaikai and their extensive hyping of that technology during the show, I did expect that they might offer compatibility through online streaming as a viable option. Their responses to questions about that in several subsequent interviews has essentially been “We hope to do that one day but definitely not at launch and we’re not really talking more about it right now.”

This has created a bit of a firestorm among hardcore gamers, many of whom thinks Sony is making a big mistake by omitting backwards compatibility and that it actually owes this to their fans, both to reward historical loyalty but also to preserve the PlayStation legacy. Probably the best articulation of this argument I’ve seen is this video in MovieBob’s Game OverThinker series. Now, I like MovieBob and a lot of what he does and I frequently agree with him. When it comes to this subject though, I think he and those who share this viewpoint are acting both very spoiled and entitled and also just simply being unreasonable. However, I also don’t think we’re entirely wrong for demanding backwards compatibility, at least when it comes to digital purchases.

The whole notion of backwards compatibility is actually relatively new, only really becoming a thing since the PS2. Previous generation systems were largely not compatible with those that came before and the story goes that PS2′s case, it was a happy accident because Sony apparently put the PS1′s processor in the machine to act as an I/O controller and it was trivially easy to add in native PS1 playback support along with that. In the case of Nintendo with the Wii, GameCube and Wii U, those systems were able to be backwards compatible because they’re all essentially the same architecture underneath, each just being a slightly tweaked and faster version of what came before. Backwards compatibility was a nice value add for the hardcore and that’s all it was supposed to be. Sony continued this trend with the PS3 initially by putting the PS2′s Emotion processor in it, ensure 100% backwards compatibility. It was cool but here’s the thing: The PS3 was also “Five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars.” That was in large part because of two things: The crazy, insane, expensive Cell processor and putting the guts of a PS2 in it. Backwards compatibility was eventually downgraded to software emulation to cut costs and when maintaining that became too difficult, it was scrapped from the PS3 altogether, at least for PS2 games. A lot of people got upset then and a lot of people are getting upset about it not even making an appearance on PS4.

Here’s the thing though guys: You aren’t owed backwards compatibility. It was a nice novelty once before but we can’t have our cake and eat it too. In this economy and with the shifts happening in the game industry, no one’s going to buy a $500+ PS4, at least not enough to make it viable. Sony needs to be able to make this system powerful and also affordable. They can’t do that if they have to put an expensive Cell processor in the thing, in addition to everything else needed to support it. Given that the vast majority of people who say they want backwards compatibility rarely if ever actually use it (I have a launch PS3 and have probably played less than 3 hours of PS2 games on it), it simply doesn’t make business sense for Sony to incur the costs of that. Charging everyone more for a feature only a few want and will largely ignore is bad business. If we don’t want another “Five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars”, sacrifices have to be made and I think backwards compatibility should be at the front of things to cut. You have a PS3, you can play all your disc games already and like with the PS2, you’ll be able to buy PS3s for at least a couple of years to come. If you’re concerned that your PS3 may die soon, buy another one when they get cheaper. It’s as simple as that. If you aren’t prepared to pay for the feature and expect everyone else to also pay for it (including those that don’t want it), then you don’t get to have it. Sony has no responsibility to support old technology in perpetuity, not for your convenience or “gaming’s legacy.” If you’re not going to buy a PS4 because it won’t play PS3 games, your priorities are broken. You don’t buy new hardware to play old stuff.

Here’s the thing though: I’m fine with this argument for disc based games but digital games and content are a whole other story.

If I want to play any of the myriad PS3 games I have sitting on Blu-ray discs, I will always be able to do that. I have a PS3 and if PlayStation Network is ever taken down, I may not be able to play games online any more but I’ll still be able to put the disc in and access any parts of my physical library that I wish. This is not so with digital games. Any content I have purchased from PSN only survives as long as I can keep it downloaded on my system and even then, some of it likely requires a server to respond to it before allowing me to play. This is content I paid for but if PSN goes away, it disappears into the ether. That’s not right and it’s not fair. If I paid for a game, I believe I deserve to always have access to it in some way. Now, should Sony one day declare that PSN for PS3 is going away and gives me the option to download everything unlocked, that would be great but it’s unlikely they would do that or that all of their publishing partners would let them. This is not an issue with discs but with digital content, I have no control over my access to it.

For disc based content, I consider this a non-issue because I can just put it in the old system and have access to it. But if Sony cannot guarantee that PSN for PS3 will be up forever, I do believe they have a responsibility to paying customers to make those products available in the future, whether through native backwards compatibility or a streaming option I can get for free or a nominal upgrade fee. Microsoft and Nintendo owe us no less. I suspect in the future when Apple decides to bring iOS out of the Windows 3.1 interface era and makes a major upgrade to it, a similar problem will occur but will cause a much bigger mainstream outrage. This is a problem that’s been largely solved on the PC with services like Steam but of course, the PC is a much more open system and thus, it’s much easier to solve there. It’s not insurmountable for the console manufacturers though and it’s a problem finally being brought into the limelight for them.

Media companies want everyone to move to a new “digital age in the cloud” and the gaming industry is probably one of the biggest proponents of this. They are desperate to cut out retail and the poisonous leeching effect is has on the profit margins of an already razor-thin profit industry. However, it will only take a few missteps like what Sony is doing with PS3 digital purchases to sour the public at large on the concept. I’ll tell you what, I’m definitely going to think a lot longer and harder about what digital purchases I make on the next consoles if I know there’s a chance they may be temporary and become unavailable to me one day. Digital distribution is critical to the game industry’s future but it can’t be a one way street and they have to make it worth our while to buy our games online instead of going to a store and physically owning it, especially if they want to keep charging the same prices. Whether you’re making a game console or a closed mobile operating system, you have to start thinking about the future as well as the present if you’re going to deliver software electronically. People might be willing to lose a bunch of $1 apps in a few years, I doubt they’ll be so accommodating with $10, $15 and $60 games.

Business, Coverage, Culture, Predictions, Video Games backwards compatibility, game consoles, PlayStation 4, Sony, video games

Can we have some enthusiasm in the enthusiast press?

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on February 19, 2013

Does anyone remember the good old days when there was actually enthusiasm in the so called gaming “enthusiast press”? In truth, it probably wasn’t that long ago but it certainly feels that way. It’s where you went to see people who were super passionate about games talk about games passionately. You expected criticism and to see things that were bad called out but you also knew you were going to a place where people took gaming as seriously as you did. Somehow in the last year or two, the enthusiasm seems to have been sucked out and replaced with a dark bitterness that really is making me wonder why some of the people who still write about this entertainment sector continue to bother. I speak in general terms of course that don’t apply across the board but something’s amiss and I don’t get when doom and gloom became the hot topic to latch onto.

I say this as someone who is a cynical bastard. I’m happy when positive things happen but most of my life, I’ve taken the stance that if you assume the worst, you’ll be disappointed less often. Even as someone with that point of view, I find it amazing just how obsessed with negativity the enthusiast press is becoming and how they seem to take a short-term event and milk it with every ounce of dread they can. The most recent example of this is the poor sales month Nintendo had in January with the Wii U. Poor is putting it mildly, it was a number that would have been disastrous for one of the current 8 year old consoles to have, forget a machine that’s only a couple of months old. The Xbox 360 which came out in 2005 and is in all likelihood getting replaced this year outsold it by more than two to one. It’s bad, real bad, even for when trying to launch a new console in a world still deep in a recession, much as the media tries to deny it.

That should be reported as such but what most outlets immediately leaped to was a quote from everyone’s favourite unaccountable hack analyst, Michael Pachter. He is saying that the Wii U was a misfire and that he’s basically put Nintendo on death watch, saying he’s doubtful they can recover from the poor launch and that the 3DS can’t sustain them as a company. Now, I can talk for hours about this twit’s horrendous track record with predictions and how the press touts his few successes while ignoring his many failures but that’s not even the point here.

The Wii U launched with a lot of software but most of it was uninteresting. And as a Wii U owner clamoring for new games, how thin the release schedule is until later this year is a worry for me. However, while there’s no doubt that Nintendo’s in a tough spot right now and has a lot to prove, when did one bad month equal total and complete meltdown? Does no one remember that this is a company that is over 100 years old and which until recently, had never failed to turn a profit? Does anyone remember how the Gamecube is called a failure to this day, despite it actually selling quite well and making Nintendo money? Nintendo is one of the most resilient, continually successful companies in the history of the world and just come off the Wii and DS, two of the most successful, profitable consoles of all time but they’re doomed because of one bad month of Wii U sales. When Apple’s stock started to drop and they failed to meet expectations last quarter, criticism was dismissed at hate and the press said they would “innovate out of their stock slump.” Even by the objectively obvious double standard that Apple operates in, they seem to be the only ones able to do right these days.

Oh yeah, did I also mention that Pachter now sits on the board of a Skinner Box social gaming company that has a direct interest in seeing the console business fail? Yeah, just when I thought the man’s commentary couldn’t get less credible, that massive conflict of interest enters the fray. I’ve yet to see that pointed out anywhere else.

Sure, the short-sighted, largely clueless investors that hold Nintendo stock won’t be happy with the launch. A lot of them wouldn’t have been happy unless it sold better than the Wii, something that was impossible and Nintendo knew. But as is always the case with this company, a couple of good first party titles can easily turn the platform’s fortunes around. I’ll be the first to admit that they should have had more of those titles at launch and that some of them are much further in the future than they should be but they will come and they will likely move hardware. This isn’t the Vita, Nintendo has some of the strongest IPs in the world and those IPs sell machines. All of this is trivially easy to glean by looking at the history of the company, yet I’ve not seen a single article discussing this, not a single reporter raising these points. All I see are inflammatory headlines like “Pachter puts Wii U and Nintendo on death watch” and “Is Nintendo doomed?” Not only is the “enthusiast press” ignoring history for convenient headlines, they are damaging the very industry they are supposed to champion by writing stories like this that scare potential customers away from the Wii U. Hell, tomorrow we’re finally supposed to get the reveal of the PlayStation 4, the first glimpse of the next generation that people have been saying is years overdue. Yet even now, I’m seeing stories questioning whether this is too little, too late and if consoles even matter any more. What the Hell happened to the excitement, to the interest in seeing the good the future may hold? Controversy drives clicks and writing stories they know will start flame wars is part of it but it goes beyond that. When did the press become so damn emo?

Nintendo is a company facing many challenges right now, of that there can be no doubt. Gaming’s changing is ways that have never been seen before and were not predicted by anyone. Many of these are not good changes either but more on that in the future. I’m also the first to admit that the growing scandal over Aliens: Colonial Marines is enough to blacken the heart of even the most naive gaming enthusiast. But seriously guys, if you can no longer write about the industry that is the sole focus of your job as if you actually enjoy it, step aside and let someone in who can actually see the glass as half full one in a while. And for the love of everything, please stop using analyst quotes as the basis for your doom and gloom pieces. These people just want attention and they’re playing you like a two dollar banjo. When even a jaded cynic is thinking you’re being too cynical, you have a real problem somewhere. Gaming is supposed to be fun, let’s start talking about it as if it’s not a burden, at least once in a while.

Business, Coverage, Predictions, Video Games enthusiast press, game journalism, gaming press, Nintendo, PlayStation, Sony, video games, Wii U

THQ’s Demise & Why There’s Plenty of Blame for Gamers Too

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on January 25, 2013

Yet another AAA publisher bit the dust today. After over 20 years in business but several of those spent struggling and a Hail Mary saving throw that a bankruptcy court ended up rejecting, THQ was officially carved up into pieces and sold off. Most of their successful studios and IP ended up at new homes (though many not at all where I expected) and a bunch of other beloved but dormant IPs like Red Faction and Homeworld will be auctioned off for much less at a later time. The auction raised only a fraction of what they needed to pay off their debts and even the biggest bids on many of these properties and teams were stunningly small, plus they have received no offers for the very talented Vigil Games studio or the Darksiders IP. Not that many years ago, all of this stuff would have been snatched up in a heartbeat and for a lot more money. Few stronger signs have ever been shown that the AAA industry doesn’t have much cash to spare these days.

I know and preach that businesses are not anyone’s friend and they are not something to get emotional over but I can’t help but feel sad at THQ’s demise. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of this failure is squarely on their shoulders and in particular, those of Brian Farrell whose years of inept leadership got them here. Relying on licensed properties for too long, focusing on quantity over quality and worst of all, the uDraw, were all done under his watch and even when it was most important, he refused to step aside and let smarter people try to save the business. He deserves to never work in video games again, though he made so much money even as the ship sunk that I suspect he will just retire after this. Despite it all, they had gotten well under way to transforming themselves from a licensed shovelware peddler into a decent mid-tier core publisher that put out largely quality games and had a bunch more in the pipe. I think if the economy wasn’t so poor and they’d been given enough capital to see out Jason Rubin’s vision, they could have become a force again. Unfortunately, we’ll never know now. Through all the mistakes and stumbles, I was still really rooting for THQ as they seemed to understand a facet of game creation that the likes of EA and Activision had forgotten. For lack of a better term, THQ’s games had soul and you could feel the passion that went into them.

With each passing year, we have fewer and fewer companies making and releasing the kinds of AAA experiences that are still my favourite way to game. There’s only a few publishers left, most of them are making their stuff in-house and almost all of them are in the red. There are no new independent AAA developers starting and most of the ones left are dropping dead or switching focus at an alarming rate. There’s more doubt than ever before that the new generation of console hardware may not be enough to reinvigorate things and that this type of gaming is simply not a viable way to make money unless you have a name like Call of Duty on your package. Even then, a couple of wildly successful franchises cannot sustain an entire platform. The thought of the majority of gaming becoming based off the current concepts that are popular in the mobile and indie scenes makes my heart sink. I feel those arenas as they are now represent a huge evolutionary step backwards for gaming and many of the design tenants and especially the business practices are not what the medium needs to evolve.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for the state of AAA gaming right now. Corporate leadership that is in many ways clueless and in other ways incredibly greedy. Short-sighted investors that don’t understand what’s necessary for long term success in a creative medium. The platform holders clinging to hardware well past it best before date and trying to make consoles about everything except playing games. The “enthusiast press” which seems to relish tearing things down these days rather than you know, being enthusiasts. And to top it all off, we have a world economy that’s still in far worse health than politicians want people to believe and the industry’s about to ask people to spend hundreds on new consoles when many are still neck deep in Apple’s fashion trend. It’s a recipe for uncertainty and doubt and I have plenty of both but there’s one key group that deserves a lot of the blame but which is rarely talked about here: Us, the gamers.

When you boil everything right down, we as a group are some of the worst customers any industry can ask for. We bitch, complain and fight about everything. We are full of mysogninist, racist, homophobic children that pollute forums and online communities. We shun and denigrate anyone who dares to try to get into games and isn’t as good at them as we are. We demand better graphics, longer campaigns, more multiplayer modes and customisation options yet still expect AAA games to cost the same amount or less after inflation that they did 30 years ago. Assuming of course that we don’t just steal them out of some warped sense of entitlement. And worst of all for the industry that tries to accommodate us, we scream for things that are different and innovative and most of us just end up buying Madden and Call of Duty for the millionth time while fresh ideas like Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders and ZombiU are ignored, lose money and end up collecting dust. Meanwhile, a company can crank out another soulless mobile Skinner Box game and have a much better chance of at least not losing any money, if not making a tidy profit. If you were trying to plan the future of a video game company, which would look better to you as a businessperson?

I of course speak of gamers in very generalised terms. Obviously we’re not all like that and I’m not lost on the fact that I speak from a privileged position where I can and do spend a lot of money on games. I get that many don’t have that luxury (especially now) and have to choose where their gaming dollars go much more carefully. But consider that if even 10% of the people who bought Call of Duty 9 this year bought Darksiders II instead, THQ might still be hanging on. If 10% of the people who bought Madden this past year bought Sleeping Dogs instead, it would have been considered a success and not a failure. We don’t get to bemoan the massive consolidation and constriction of innovation happening in the AAA space right now while also feeling like we don’t have to do our part to keep it going. Games are an incredibly high risk industry and getting more so by the day. It’s a business and it needs to make money. If we aren’t going to do our part to support the types of games we all claim we want to see, we aren’t going to get them, that’s just reality. If you don’t want to just see the shelves full of Call of Duty derivatives, then stop buying only Call of Duty and give something else a chance to impress you with something new.

Industries need customers or they can’t survive and grow. There’s a lot of us out there who still love AAA gaming and don’t want to see everything slide into the mobile sinkhole. But it’s up to us to make AAA gaming attractive and to support the kinds of things we want to see whenever we can. If you’re one of the many people bemoaning the death of THQ today, think about how many of their games you bought in the last year when they needed you the most. If we’re not going to be part of the solution, then we are automatically part of the problem. Either we create the market for what we want or it will cease to be, it’s as simple as that.

Business, Culture, Predictions, Video Games AAA gaming, game consoles, predictions, THQ, video games

My Bold Predictions for 2013

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on January 2, 2013

Happy New Year! Alrighty, now that I’ve judged myself on my Bold Predictions for 2012 (and done not so badly overall though always with room for improvement), it’s time to spit em’ out for 2013. I’m hung over, have a sore back, haven’t slept and oh yeah, have to head back to what will be an insane merger-induced grind tomorrow so I’m actually not in a blogging mood but dammit, predictions must flow! I’m going to try to put in everything I can think of before posting this but I do these kind of off-the-cuff and with no pre-planning so I am going to reserve the right to add to the post for up to 48 hours after publishing it in case I remember anything. These are also tech and gaming predictions. I have predictions in the economic and political arenas too but these will be long enough and frankly, I don’t have the time or the energy for political arguments.

And away we go!

Gaming

THQ’s new private equity owner will ensure all their games in the pipe come out but the company will be split up and sold off shortly after. This is honestly a shame because despite the absolute idiocy of that company’s management (Jason Rubin being very much an exception), they’ve managed to keep a lot of talent and put out some pretty good games. That said, the AAA industry is in a state of massive flux right now (more on that later) and even the big boys can’t figure out how to reliably succeed in it so I can’t see who would want to fund another go for THQ in that arena. There’s a lot of mystery around this eleventh hour deal but from what I’ve read, it looks like vultures who want to ring out whatever profits they can from the nearly finished games in the pipe and then sell the studios and IP for some additional profit. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.
Mobile gaming will continue to grow but the honeymoon is over. This is kind of an extension of a prediction from last year but I’m declaring it to have a bigger effect this year. I’ve banged on about how the meteoric growth of this industry (and the companies whose platforms it runs on) is a fashion trend, that the growth is unsustainable and that a big equalisation adjustment is coming as it already has in the social space. Mobile has quickly been usurped by big companies and the only games that are attaining mass scale success are from big companies with the occasional fluke like Angry Birds was. It’s a super hit driven industry just like AAA is and the press will no longer be able to ignore that as they’ve been doing for a while now. This type of gaming’s not going anywhere and that’s a good thing but this is the year reality hits and people realise it isn’t all milk, honey and guaranteed riches. Mobile will continue to exist and thrive but it’s not going to replace other ways of gaming any time soon if ever. To tie into this…
The general public will start to tire of free-to-play Skinner Box mechanics. This right here is why I can’t stand most mobile games. Everything’s filled with microtransactions, nags to spend money and a damn store front between every level, whether it makes design sense or not. It’s a terrible, exploitive way to design games, I hate it and I’ve already heard more than a few other people who are tired of it too. When people look at their credit card statements and realise those 5 $0.99 games they bought actually cost more like $25 in total in order to make them good and not just grind fests, they get frustrated and I think we’ll see more of that. This mechanic isn’t going away but I do think we’re going to start seeing mobile games that offer complete experiences for a higher price.
The WiiU will be a modest success. I’m sure Nintendo realises that much like mobile is now, the Wii’s growth was fashion driven and I’m sure they have no such expectations with the WiiU and have budgeted accordingly. I got one of these for Christmas and despite some dumb decisions they made (largely regarding patch structure, DRM and the GamePad’s battery, all of which can be fixed), this is an amazing platform that offers a lot of promise and uniqueness. This isn’t a Wii with a low-rent tablet attached and anyone who thinks so is either uninformed or more likely an Apple fanboy. I still don’t see Nintendo winning over third parties in a big way with this but as always, their own stunning developer talent will carry the WiiU to profitability.
The Vita will go from limping to crawling. Naming the Vita one of my disappointments of 2012 hurt because I love this thing so much. It’s incredible hardware and it’s a steal at $250 and it shows how you can do good portable gaming without compromise but no one’s making games for it. Even when they’re hurting bad though, Sony’s not one to throw in the towel and I don’t think they will here. They’ll keep pushing it and I do believe it will continue to sell small numbers and probably will never be a runaway success but I do think it will advance enough this year to keep owners like myself in some decent content. I also believe Sony’s next home system will give it a big push but more on that later.
Console shovelware is dead. It’s already happening and good bloody riddance! The Wii and DS were kind of the last bastions for the vulture publishers who make their living cranking out cheap, garbage games for $30-$40 in the hopes of catching suckers at Wal-Mart. The increased development costs of the new systems (which many believe to be 2-3x what they are now at a minimum) will make this slimy practice an impossible model. These publishers won’t simply move to mobile either because there’s already too much garbage in that space and because they were run by scummy businesspeople who didn’t really understand the industry as a whole, they won’t know how to adapt to the realities of the mobile market and will likely just up and die off. They deserve to rot.
The first major Kickstarter disaster will happen and will test people’s faith in the crowdfunding model. I think this model of funding games is brilliant and I spent way too much on Kickstarters this year. However, at least one of these projects is either not going to come out and zero out everybody’s “investment” or it will come out, be far below the majority’s expectations and people will feel ripped off. There have just been too many projects and a big portion of those are fuelled by rose-tinted nostalgic expectations. I know I’m probably going to hate at least a couple of the finished projects that I backed. No disrespect to Brian Fargo and I so hope Wasteland 2 is killer but inXile’s track record is not good. The Peter Molyneux and David Braben projects are also just gross and while perfectly legit, abuse the Kickstarter spirit in my opinion. The thing is, I fully knew what I was getting into when I backed them and the whole point of Kickstarter and that you roll the dice and take your chances. Most people don’t know that though or they say they do but don’t really mean it. When one of these games comes out to poor reviews or worse yet, doesn’t come out at all, a lot of people are going to feel burned and run away from crowdfunding. The people that do get it will continue to make it a viable means of indie development which is awesome but much like mobile, we’re still in the honeymoon phase.
The OUYA will come out and find niche success. I don’t really think the OUYA folks believe this is going to be the thing that overtakes Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo but I also think the fanboy press who largely hated on this thing not because of it’s ideas but because it’s Android and called it no less than a scam were dead wrong. None of them will do the right thing and eat crow of course but I didn’t expect it as such. Developer kits for this have already shipped whereas the press’ golden boy project I’ll talk about next is delayed until March, maybe. There seems to be a lot of developer hype for this and I think it’s a really cool idea. I actually backed it but had to reduce my pledge due to money issues but if this makes it to market, I’ll happily grab one to try it out.
The Oculus Rift will come out late and underwhelm. The same press outlets who have been dumping on OUYA have used such fashionable terms as “the future” to describe this thing. I think it’s very cool and if it does what it does well and gets game support, I’ll totally get one. However, all attempts at virtual reality have proven cumbersome and not generally worth the experience and I’ve seen nothing to indicate this will be otherwise. I do think this could find niche success but I think the press’ own hype of this will be to its detriment when normal consumers start getting their hands on it. I’ll be happy to be wrong about this.
Layoffs, studios closures and the viability of AAA development will be a bigger story than ever. This was one of the dominating themes of 2012 and as we go through yet another year waiting for new consoles, I think it’s only going to get worse. Sales are falling (no one’s 100% sure of why but many think it’s not just the normal end-of-cycle downturn), costs are set to skyrocket and anything that isn’t a sure fire hit is a recipe for financial catastrophe. Any studio that hasn’t consistently pumped out critical and commercial successes can’t get work anymore and we now have fewer publishers able to fund new AAA projects than ever before. I love AAA gaming and it pains me greatly to see it in such decline but unless people get bored of mobile games and come running back to it, I don’t see how they fix this going forward. My hope is that this is an adjustment and the industry will realign itself and come out stronger but that requires new players to enter the space and no one is.
Valve’s Steam box will not release this year but will enter the promised beta phase. My feeling is it will be a standardised PC design that runs customised Linux with Steam on it. And for that reason, I will probably not care because it will have a fraction of my library available to me and most of it is going to be indie stuff I don’t need to play on my TV or that I can play by running an HDMI cable from my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a cool idea and from the way they’ve talked about it being able to run competing software, it might even be Valve’s own attempt at an OUYA-like thing which could be something special indeed.
Steam on Linux will remain niche at best. Despite the hypocrisy of Valve and others towards Windows 8, I do get where some of their concerns are rooted and I share them. However, to think Linux is going to ever gain mainstream adoption of any kind, especially gaming at this stage is a pipe dream. Even the versions of it that are designed to be “desktop friendly” are a nightmare to maintain, drivers are a mess and the community as a whole is still full of elitists who drive the mainstream away and like it that way. All that’s fine, I’ve got nothing against any of that if that’s the way you want a platform to be but all of those things mean it will never take over Windows. Kudos to Valve for making a concerted effort to make the platform viable for gaming and I do hope they can succeed in some way. But if they do, it won’t be for a long time to come.
Cross-media gaming will be attempted multiple times and never take off. Frank Gibeau from EA as well as babbling heads like Kevin Dent say that big gaming franchises have to have components everywhere. Beyond your console or PC game, there has to be a tie-in product on your phone, your tablet, your browser and anywhere else in order to keep you engaged at all times. I think this is a dumb idea and a waste of developer talent and resources. EA tried it with Mass Effect 3 and all the tie-in content sucked and no one really cared as far as I can tell. I won’t talk about this too much here because I have a future blog post about it planned.
There will be no new games announced or released from Valve this year (Dota 2 excepted). Forget Half-Life 2: Episode 3, we will get zilch from them in 2013. Between their new hardware experiment, Steam for Linux and whatever else, they aren’t going to be in a rush to put anything out. I excepted Dota 2 from this because it’s technically out to anyone who wants it already but it may exit beta.
DayZ standalone will launch late and be a buggy, hacker ridden mess like all Bohemia Interactive launches. Don’t get me wrong, I think the ideas of DayZ are absolutely fantastic, even if I burned out on the game after a month and I respect Bohemia as a developer a ton for finding a super tight niche and thriving in it. But the fact remains that their launch track record is abysmal and I don’t expect that to change with the standalone DayZ game. I hope they buck the trend this time because they might have the birth of a new genre on their hands and they’d be foolish to burn it right at the start.

Next-Gen Consoles

This gets its own section because there’s just too much to talk about regarding the next Xbox and PlayStation. There’s no doubt in my mind that these machines will be radically different from anything that’s come before. They have to be because making themselves stand out against phones and tablets (for better or worse) is a must.

Both the next Microsoft and Sony systems will be announced and shipped this year. Rumour is the next Xbox was supposed to come out in 2012 and got delayed for major retooling. The industry can’t wait any more, new hardware has to happen this year or there will be no one left to make stuff for it.
Both platforms will use far fewer specialised parts and be more like PCs than ever. It’s cheaper, most of the off-the-shelf parts are more powerful and most importantly, it’s much easier and faster to develop for. The days of Cell processors and weird memory allocation issues are over, they have to be. I’m guessing each system will have a minimum of 4GB RAM and hard drives will be standard but not SSDs.
Both platforms will offer every title in every tier for sale digitally on day one. Sony’s already trying this with select PS3 games. We’ve reached a tipping point where despite the telecartel’s best efforts, broadband is becoming a viable way to get large content and video game retail is losing its stranglehold on publishers and platform holders. By selling games digitally, the useless middleman who rips off the industry and consumers with used games gets cut out, pricing flexibility and sales are easy obtained and everyone makes more money. Retail is the only reason this wasn’t done before and Microsoft and Sony realise it’s time to throw caution to the wind and just do it. Whether I embrace this depends on whether they do DRM intelligently. They can look to Nintendo for how not to do it.
Free-to-play will become a big deal on consoles. Again, Sony tried this first with DUST 514 and Microsoft tried it with an XBLA title that wasn’t very good. However, they both know how much money there is to be made here, Sony especially since free-to-play is where Sony Online Entertainment makes most of its money now. The ability to handle microtransactions will exist at the system level and seamlessly integrate into both platform’s store front systems. For this to work though, another major change must happen and that is…
Console certification processes will continue to exist but will significantly lighten and be sped up. Free-to-play titles live and die on how quickly they can iterate. PlanetSide 2 has probably had a dozen or more patches since it left beta and it’s a better game for it. If each of those patches required weeks of sitting in certification limbo, it would have been disastrous. One of the big complaints from developers big and small over the last year has been how expensive and unnecessarily burdensome the console certification process is. Given that numerous games still ship completely broken or in some cases unfinished, it’s clearly not working as it is. Games shouldn’t have to wait weeks to make sure they prompt you to select your storage device and specifically tell you “Don’t turn off your console” when they’re saving data. I don’t know enough about the current processes to know how they will be streamlined but this must and will happen.
SmartGlass will be a big deal for Xbox and Vita integration will be big for PlayStation. Being able to have your console content interact with your phone or tablet is largely a dumb gimmick right now but Nintendo is showing how you can do it in unique and interesting ways. Microsoft will expand their SmartGlass platform to make this a much bigger (yet still optional) component of the gaming and media experience on Xbox. I believe Sony has plans to do something similar but on a more unique scale with the Vita due to the things it offers that phones and tablets can’t. I don’t know if tightly integrating the Vita into the home PlayStation experience can save the platform but I really hope it breathes new life into it.
Motion gaming is over. The Kinect was a fad and it’s largely dried up and almost no one’s making games for it any more, certainly nothing with a decent budget. Move died even quicker. The public’s got over motion gaming and I don’t think putting it in the box with the next systems is going to make it popular again. No matter how precise you make it, it’s still not the best way to play games. The next Xbox might support the current Kinect but I don’t think we’ll see another one.
Like PC, AAA games will be only a single segment of the gaming experiences available on consoles. This industry simply can’t afford to focus on AAA content exclusively, especially since costs and risks are only going to get more insane. But variety is good and despite some incredible gems coming out of console downloadable services (including half of my top 10 games of 2012), there’s really only the AAA stuff and the high-end downloadable stuff. I believe that free-to-play and a newly refocused effort on promoting and fostering smaller indie development, consoles are suddenly going to have the wide variety of game types, production values and price points that you could previously only get on PC and on mobile to a lesser extent. I think this is going to be the single biggest paradigm shift in the history of the console industry and it’s sorely overdue. This is what’s going to keep it relevant against up and coming platforms.
Sony will offer backwards compatibility via their Gaikai acquisition at some point but likely not at launch. They bought that company to probably eventually make PlayStation a platform that isn’t dependant on hardware but for now, I could see them using it this way since the rumoured radical hardware changes in the next console will likely make built-in backwards compatibility impossible. I don’t know if you’ll buy individual games or a subscription service or maybe some kind of hybrid tied into PlayStation Plus. Personally, I’d happy pay a few bucks a month to get access to a huge PS2 and PSP library. I do sincerely hope people who made PSN purchases on PS3 will get automatic Gaikai versions. I’m not counting on it though.
Microsoft will not offer retail game backwards compatibility but will offer it for certain XBLA titles like the 360 does with original Xbox games. I don’t think they want to risk pissing off people who will lose access to everything XBLA but they also aren’t going to go through the headache of making every game work. Most XBLA titles never pushed the 360′s processing power very hard so in theory, software backwards compatibility could be enough for most of those titles. I imagine they will also keep the 360 on sale and the Live system for that system up and running for a while.
PC gaming will keep getting bigger and challenge the notion of whether many hardcore gamers even need a console. Due to the PC-like architecture rumoured to be powering the new systems, making quality PC ports will be easier than ever and with that goes the reason many PC gamers had for also owning a console. If I could be assured that the majority of AAA PC ports were well done and more like they’ve been in the last year, I’d seriously consider only buying the next consoles when they were cheaper for exclusives.

Technology

The Apple fashion trend will finally begin to normalise but the press will ignore it. I’ll say it again before fanboys lose their minds: This does not mean I think Apple’s going away. They aren’t and despite being a mean-spirited, greedy company riding a choreographed public and press perception, it’s a very good thing that they’re around. However, between market saturation, maturing competition and people realising that a lot of their products are underpowered, overpriced and riding hype and form rather than function, their growth is going to start to go from bubble to something more realistic. This is what happens with bubbles. Their stock price has already slid 25% in 2012 but you know how many stories about it I’ve seen from the numerous tech sites I follow? Zero, even though many of these sites live blog their earnings calls. There’s a trend in modern media to build people or companies up high and then kick them back down but that’s never how it’s worked with Apple. They always get a huge free pass that others don’t and I think that’s going to continue. The market’s waking up though and whether fanboys like it or not, a lot of people still don’t use Apple products and many more realise their stuff isn’t necessarily the best at everything.
The Apple television is not coming. I made this prediction last year but the rumour won’t die so I’m reserving the right to make it again. Nearly everyone who is big in the TV business is bleeding to death right now. The HDTV market is saturated with people who see no compelling reason to upgrade. Paying 30-50% more for a screen with an Apple logo and the guts of a $99 Apple TV box (especially when many already have iPads you can plug into any TV) is simply not going to happen. Steve Jobs had one line in his biography where he said he’d figured out how to innovate in the TV space. Only for Apple does that one throwaway bit of information lead to an endless stream of speculation on how they’ll somehow revolutionise the TV space. It’s not going to happen.
The iPhone 5S will be the next model but in the Fall, not the Spring. Many think that after Apple burned their hardcore by announcing a newer iPad only six months after the previous one that the same thing would start happening with the iPhone too. Aside from the fact that iPhone sales are down because the 5 doesn’t offer anything worth upgrading for, the 6 month iPad debacle was I think just an experiment to see how far they can push people. I don’t think they’re going to keep doing that.
BlackBerry 10 will sustain RIM, not catapult them forward. By all accounts, it’s a fantastic operating system and their stock has been reflecting the buzz. The problem is that all 3 of the other major mobile platforms all tie into something bigger. iOS ties into Apple, Android ties into Google’s many services and Windows Phone ties into PCs. All RIM has is mobile and that’s going to make things tougher for them. I imagine that it’s extreme manageability, security features and flexibility will still make it the ideal corporate platform and most of their current corporate and government base will continue using them, as will a niche group of others. But their previous leadership was too short sighted to see the consumer battle approaching and they’ve lost it. I think they’ll refocus on what they have and serving that well.
PC sales will slide a bit as the industry normalises but the slide will not be huge and it will settle. While I think tablets are a horrible way to do anything but the lightest computing tasks, there’s a big segment of the population that only has to do the lightest tasks. Those people are buying tablets instead of PCs and with good reason. In addition, a weakening global economy means enterprise spending is slowing across the board and that’s where a lot of PC sales come from. The PC will be the dominant computing platform for the foreseeable future, anyone who says otherwise is clueless. But the industry has been red hot for too long and some cooling should happen. I hope this will thing out some of the garbage vendors and maybe stop the race to the bottom for a while.
Windows 8 will sell well below expectations. I think the hyperbolic hate for Windows 8 is way overblown but I get and share some of the big concerns about it. I’ve used it but not full-time and at some point soon, I will be upgrading my gaming rig to it so I can properly judge for myself. Depending on who you ask, it’s either selling OK or worse than Vista which was a dud as Windows sales go and for good reason, it was garbage. Some sales softness can be attributed to slowing PC sales but there has rightly or wrongly been some poison injected into the mainstream consciousness about Windows 8. Microsoft’s been desperate to chase the anti-choice, closed ecosystem model that Apple made popular and I think that’s stupid. They should be running the other way, embracing the opposite side and evangelising that. I believe that the poor sales of Windows 8 and the Surface tablets will cause them to re-evaluate what they’re doing with Windows and maybe back off or make optional some of what people hate about it.
Windows Phone 8 will rise to a respectable market share. I was wrong about this last year with Windows Phone 7 but my girlfriend is in love with WP8, as is everyone who buys a phone with it. There’s been lost of buzz slowly building about it and when the platform launched in China, it sold out everywhere in 2 hours, far outpacing the iPhone 5, even though it also set a record. Android is decimating all right now and that’s not going to change, nor are a sizable number of Apple faithful going to jump ship. But there’s still a big market out there of people who don’t own smartphones or who want to switch away from BlackBerry or older Android devices and I think there’s a big chance for Windows Phone there. After playing with my girlfriend’s Lumia 920, it makes my BlackBerry 9900 look last century and if I could afford a new phone tomorrow, it’s without question the one I would get.
The TV industry will make a new push from 3D TVs to 2K or 4K TVs. I said we would see no mention of 2K/4K TVs last year and I was right, as I was about 3D dying off. However, the Japanese TV manufacturers are bleeding out fast and they need something, anything to resuscitate their fortunes. I don’t think the market is ready for 2K/4K yet but damned if they aren’t going to try to make it ready.
Sharp will go bankrupt and Panasonic will have a massive restructuring. Whether Sharp goes the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 I don’t know but there’s no way for them to recover from the death spiral they’re in. Panasonic is already talking about shedding Sanyo and I think that’s only the tip of the iceberg for them. Sony is well underway with it’s restructuring now but Panasonic’s going to announce some kind of similar radical plan that will involve much deeper cuts due to them not being as diversified as Sony.
We will start to see more mainstream PCs come standard with SSDs or a combination of SSD and hard drive. SSDs have gotten so incredibly cheap that it’s becoming worth it for PC manufacturers to put them in medium-class models just to boast about how fast they are. There are even low-end SSDs that are so inexpensive, they could even make it into some of the cheap big box systems.

And after another epic length post, there’s all my predictions for 2013! There’s a lot of uncertainty in not only the tech and gaming industries but in the world in general. Still, I think there’s a lot to look forward to and I’m very curious to see what lies ahead. I hope your 2012 was good to you and yours and that your 2013 will be even better. I’m very stoked for a lot of things coming in my life this year and may only my good predictions be the right ones. Happy New Year once again!

Business, Business, Computers, Coverage, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Predictions, Tablets, Technology, Video Games 2013, AAA games, Android, Apple, Apple TV, BlackBerry, console gaming, free-to-play games, game consoles, iPhone, Kickstarter, Linux, Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, mobile games, motion gaming, next-gen consoles, Nintendo, Oculus Rift, OUYA, Panasonic, PC gaming, predictions, Research In Motion, Sharp, solid state drives, Sony, Steam, tablets, televisions, THQ, Valve, Vita, WiiU, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8

Revisiting My Bold Predictions for 2012

1 Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on December 31, 2012

The end of 2012 is upon us. Personally, it’s been a Hell of a year, not just in the industries I observe with interest but for me in general. My girlfriend passed the UFE and will be a Chartered Accountant in a few months, we moved from our small apartment into a house (still renting though), we got a puppy and my company reverse merged with another company, went public as a result and changed it’s 30+ year name in the process. And that’s just a bit of it. It was very good overall though and I think 2013′s going to be even better! Before I make my bold predictions for the new year, I must of course revisit those I made for the year that’s just ending. Go here to find them as I will only mention their titles here and more in-depth explanations are included in the original post. I’m going to ape a neat system the crew at Gamers With Jobs came up with and rate how accurate I was in terms of a score. I made 30 predictions (29 “real” ones and 1 joke) so that’s the total the score can be. If I was mostly or totally right on a prediction, I get 1 point. If I was half-right or had some critical information wrong but the gist was accurate, I get half a point. And finally, if I was dead wrong, I get zilch. I’m also only scoring the bolded parts which are the actual predictions, not the additional details which are just general thoughts. This is scored by me of course but hey, this ain’t scientific or nothin’. I will try to judge myself honestly.

Off we go!

Gaming

THQ will manage to secure additional investment or credit but this will be their last gasp at survival before they run out of cash (half point.) As far as I know, they didn’t get additional money, they were just able to tap a line of credit they hadn’t used. They still ran out of cash and declared bankruptcy just recently, being swept up by a private equity firm. Danny Bilson left but Brian Farrell’s still around and his long-term future there is still unknown.
GSC Game World’s upcoming news will be that the company is indeed dead (1 point.) The company still exists but has no staff so it’s basically dead. A new studio did in fact start up with the old staff but they’re making a free-to-play online game in a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like universe but not with the actual IP which they couldn’t secure. A bit of a battle has started up between the remnants of GSC and bitComposer Games over the IP.
The 3DS will continue to sell well at the current price point and the Vita will not do the numbers Sony wants but will do enough to keep the platform afloat (1 point.) I was right on about the 3DS and not fully on the Vita but I’m calling it a win because while it did underperform, Sony keeps saying they’re backing it going forward and there are games coming, though not many. I so hope the Vita can find it’s footing.
The successor to the Xbox 360 will be announced at E3 and the PS4 will be teased only (0 points.) No other way to say it, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. This is the year both will be announced but I won’t make a prediction on that specifically because it’s too obvious.
The WiiU will get a price and a ship date in the holiday quarter (1 point.) Bang on, though this wasn’t exactly a stretch. They also did solve the problem of multiple tablets but in a half-assed way that’s not close to ready yet. I think the launch lineup was OK and it’s been selling out but talk has been soft so it’s too early to tell how it’s doing.
The wonderful trend of analysts either talking less or the gaming press finally realising they’re not worth listening to will continue (0 points.) Why oh why couldn’t I have been right about this? It seemed like the enthusiast press was finally over leeching clicks off these hacks but they’re doing it as much as ever with even more analysts (and even purposefully obscure hacks like Dent and industry failures like Broussard) beaking off in the press all the time. This is a scourge that needs to stop.
This is the year where the realities of mobile development start to become clear in the development community (1 point.) This didn’t happen to the degree I expected it to but I’m calling it a win because it has already started. Multiple promising mobile developers have died this year, largely because they foolishly believed the mobile gold rush meant nobody could fail. I’ll flesh this out more with my 2013 predictions.
Many Facebook developers will continue to struggle or in the case of the big boys like Zynga, show themselves to be grossly overvalued and not as big a money press as once thought (1 point.) Nailed it! Zynga’s in a death spiral, Facebook itself has a disastrous fraud-filled year and we haven’t heard a peep in months about a big new social startup. A lot of this is because most Facebook games don’t work on mobile platforms and that’s increasingly where Facebook usage is going. This field isn’t going away but much like mobile, it’s getting kicked in the face by reality instead of hype.
AAA publishers that are not Activision will keep losing money and AAA developers will continue to be hit-or-die (1 point.) Nailed again but again, I wish I was wrong. Most of the few AAA publishers left are either losing money or just squeaking out modest profits whereas Activision is still sucking the marrow from Blizzard and Call of Duty. Numerous developers went under this year and almost all of those can be tied to the failure of a single title. This is a dark time to be in AAA and it makes me sad.
Diablo III will come out some time this year and it will be a huge hit but not as big a one as Blizzard or Bobby Kotick thinks (half point.) It did come out and was a huge hit but as far as I know, it’s done extremely well. It’s up to something like 7 million sales now and despite being basically broken, the real money auction house is generating revenue. I do think that part is doing worse than Blizzard wanted but I don’t think they’re disappointed with the money the game’s made.
Star Wars: The Old Republic will experience a sharp drop in subscribers (1 point.) Bang on. They flailed about trying out a trial model, then went to a horrible exploitive free-to-play system and by many accounts, this detonated the upper echelons of BioWare. I actually think it’s a good game, it just came out at the wrong time with a foolish business model.
John Riccitiello’s leadership at EA will be strongly challenged (0 points.) There were rumblings in the press that he was in trouble but nothing public happened.
Free-to-play will start to really shine this year in non-Asian RPG ways (1 point.) Oh yes! One of my top 10 games of the year is free-to-play and I’ve got like 5 or 6 of them installed on my PC right now. Not all of them do it right (particularly on mobile platforms) but those that do are making great games and best as I can tell, tidy profits too.
Half-Life 2: Episode 3/Half-Life 3 will not release this year (1 point.) Is anyone really surprised? I know Valve’s way of doing business means this won’t happen until they feel like it but seriously guys, enough is enough. This series made you a success and your fans are owed closure.
Highly intrusive DRM schemes on PC games will be scaled back, though DRM in general will still be an issue (1 point.) Ubisoft dropped their always-on DRM (though activations are still needed) but Diablo III embraced the horrible practice with both hands, which caused highly publicised launch nightmares. It’s definitely a lessening trend though which I am very happy to see.
I may potentially buy an iPad 3 to try out iOS gaming (half point.) I split a used iPad 2 with my girlfriend which is why I call this a halfsie because I did specifically say iPad 3. Overall, I’ve been very disappointed. iOS uses dated design and most mobile games that I’ve tried have been terrible. I was wrong about the iPad 3 having Retina too, they totally figured that out. If I even need a tablet of my own any time soon, it will either be Windows 8 Pro or Android.
SECTION SCORE: 11.5/16

Technology

Apple will not release a branded television (1 point.) I can’t believe I’m seemingly one of the only people who didn’t think this was obvious. There is no market for a TV that will end up costing 30-50% more (which it will have to for it to have the margins Apple wants) but which just has the guts of an Apple TV box you can buy for $99. One line from Jobs’ biography where he says he “cracked it” means exactly squat.
This is the year Android tablets finally become competitive (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because while Android tablet sales are up significantly (particularly with the introduction of the Nexus tablets), the iPad still dominates the tablet market and from what I can tell, most Android apps are still made for phones exclusively or primarily. It’s getting better but it’s still not the competitor it needs to be.
Research In Motion will finally remove Balsillie and Lazaridis from their leadership roles at the company (1 point.) BOOM! Most of my secondary predictions were right too. Their stock plummeted but is recovering well and by all accounts, BlackBerry 10 could be something special. I really hope so, I don’t want to see this company die.
More than 50% of laptop models released this year will not include an optical drive (0 points.) There’s no doubt that far fewer laptops have them but I’ve not been able to find a statistic that confirms whether I’m right or not. If I can, I’ll update this but I think if more than half were ditching the optical drive, it would have made the news somewhere.
Hard drive prices will return to pre-flood levels (1 point.) Checking a few places online where I can buy a hard drive, I’m saying this is right.
Microsoft will announce a scaling back or removal of the new Start Screen in Windows 8 or make it 100% optional (0 points.) I was so wrong about this, I should almost be deducting points for it. I think the hate for Windows 8 is overblown but I do have major concerns about what it means for the future of Windows and the Start Screen is still stupid on anything that isn’t a touch screen. It’s questionable how well Windows 8 is selling right now so I hope Microsoft is taking the negative feedback to heart.
Windows 8 will shine on tablets and will also start to compete with Android for a big share of the iPad’s market (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because by all accounts, Windows 8 is killer on tablets but Surface has apparently been a sales flop and the app ecosystem is not taking off like many (including myself) thought it would. This could still change but so far, it hasn’t made a dent in the market share of the other platforms.
Windows Phone 7 will get a massive marketing push and gain a lot of market share (0 points.) Windows Phone 7 became Windows Phone 8 and while it looks like interest and sales are ramping up, it hasn’t gained a ton of market share yet, certainly not even to make anyone besides maybe RIM nervous. My girlfriend bought a Lumia 920 though and thinks the iPhone pales in comparison to it, as do many other people. Microsoft is traditionally horrible at marketing but if they can figure that out, I still think they could have a winner here.
Twitter will continue to grow in popularity but still won’t figure out how to make money (1 points.) Calling it a win because it’s definitely still growing but given how there have been no stories about the financial success this year, no IPO and how they’re clamping down hard on how much third party clients can bang on their servers, I’m guessing they still don’t have a long-term business model yet.
Facebook will remain insanely popular but each user will do less with it (0.5 points.) It’s obviously still popular and a ton of people I know personally are using it less and less but I’m not convinced that’s the overall trend. As they continue to test the limits and patience of their users with more invasive ads and terms of use changed though, this might change.
3D will continue to decline and possibly die off in the home entirely (1 point.) Most TV manufacturers are using 3D as a bullet point now but they’ve all run away from making that a reason to convince people to buy new sets. The big Japanese TV manufacturers are all nursing sucking chest wounds right now so they better figure something out fast. I was also right about how the idea of mainstream 2K or 4K TVs didn’t happen. 3D is still a thing in theatres but that’s about it.
Best Buy will announce a major corporate restructuring this year, closing underperforming stores and refocusing on providing high quality service (0.5 points.) If I allowed myself three quarter points, that’s what I would get because I was right about everything except the announced refocusing on high quality service. The company’s bleeding, stores have been closed and one of the original guys is trying to take the company private. Refocusing on service is the only thing that can save them but they’re still arrogantly convinced that the horrendous experience they currently offer is quality service.
Canadian third party Internet prices will rise but not as much as people fear (1 point.) Nailed it! Prices went up but only a little bit and as I understand it, the third party Canadian ISP industry is still squeaking out razor-thin margins. This makes me very happy to see, especially since more and more people I know are dumping the telecartels for them. They’re still fighting a tough war but I’m glad the fight’s being made.
I will continue to search in vain for a tech podcast that doesn’t spend most of its time fellating Apple or that realises tech news exists that doesn’t involve phones or tablets (1 point.) This was a joke prediction but I’m still right. I’ve tried me damndest to find one since dumping This is Only A Test after both the content and the attitude of the guys from that site finally drove me over the edge. I’ve yet to find another one that doesn’t continue to trumpet how Apple is our lord and saviour or that phones and tablets aren’t the only neat things in the world. It’s a shame but such is life. I don’t currently listen to any tech podcasts and I don’t really miss having one anyway.
SECTION SCORE: 9/14

TOTAL SCORE: 20.5/30

Overall, I’m still way more accurate than the majority of analysts that get quoted in the enthusiast press. That’s ridiculous and sad. I’m a guy with no knowledge of business or the inside scoop on anything and my largely uninformed guesses were better than guys who make orders of magnitude more than I do to spout this stuff. Insane. I’ve had better years but also worse years but to be honest, most of the stuff I was right on is stuff I would have been happy to be dead wrong about. I don’t like to be a prophet of doom but it seems like that’s my skill sometimes.

Check back tomorrow where my new predictions for 2013 will be unleashed! There will definitely be plenty of them as well as this is shaping up to be an even crazier year in gaming and tech than 2012 was.

Business, Business, Computers, Coverage, Coverage, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Predictions, Tablets, Technology, Video Games 2012, 3DS, Android, Apple, Apple TV, Diablo III, Facebook, GSC Game World, Microsoft, mobile phones, Nintendo, predictions, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Sony, Star Wars: The Old Republic, SWTOR, tablets, technology, THQ, video games, Vita, Windows 8, Windows Phone

Steam Does What Nintendon’t

1 Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on December 28, 2012

Yep, I totally titled this blog post with a reference to an old, hilariously bad Genesis marketing slogan. I figured that since this post is going to be filled with nothing else but vitriol and rage, that I should at least try to inject some bad humour somewhere. To be honest, I know I’m preaching to the choir here as if you’re someone who is in a position to be affected by this issue, you likely already know what it is and are nodding your head. Nonetheless, this is something I need to rant about because it was actually so bad that it soured my initial impressions of a system I was really excited for.

To my great shock, I got a Wii U Deluxe Set for Christmas because my girlfriend and her parents are amazing. I had planned to get one but couldn’t afford it at launch and had no expectation of getting it for Christmas. I couldn’t wait to get home and try it out. I already knew about the hour long firmware update and while that was dumb and annoying, I’d planned for it so whatever. Then I decided to do the transfer of my sizable amount of purchased content from my Wii, about 90% of which is Virtual Console games. I’d heard that the transfer process was unnecessarily complicated but also doable so I decided to get it over with. What I discovered was that the process is much worse than most people said and that how bad of an experience it can be is directly proportional to how much content you’ve purchased. Let me put that another way: The more money you voluntarily gave Nintendo, the harder the process is. This is absolute bullshit and there is absolutely no reason for it, as I will demonstrate later.

Firstly, you have to download the Wii Transfer Tool onto both systems. It doesn’t come pre-installed on the Wii U, there’s just a link in the menu that takes you to the download page. This would be fine were it not for the fact that the Nintendo store servers were absolutely swamped and constantly errored out on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Guys, this is probably the single biggest activation day the Wii U will ever have, how did you not scale for it?! I gave up doing this on Christmas Day but succeeded at getting the tool on both systems on Boxing Day.

The first thing you’re told is that you need an SD card for the transfer process. Alright, that’s cool. Like most people, I store most of my downloaded Wii content on an SD card because the Wii has virtually no internal space for large stuff. What I’d assumed was that the transfer process would recognise this, merge that data with whatever you have stored on the Wii internal memory and package it all up so you can plug it into the Wii U and you’re away. Nope. It turns out that in fact, the transfer tool will only backup stuff that lives in Wii system memory. That means that everything you have on the SD card must be moved to the system memory one item at a time (there is no way to move them in batches) and if like me, you have way too much stuff to fit in system memory, you have to check all the sizes of the items and exclude enough to make everything fit. Stuff you’ve bought and had to delete can be re-downloaded from the Wii Shop later but I’ll get to that.

This didn’t initially anger me so much as make me tilt my head, not unlike my puppy does when he sees something he’s curious about. I re-read the poorly written transfer tool instructions multiple times, certain I’d missed something. Nope, this is totally how it works. This really pissed me off but I centered myself by remembering that this process only has to be done once. I started the transfer process on my Wii and my anger was quelled somewhat by the absolutely adorable Pikmin progress animation that accompanies it. The transfer off the Wii went fast…way too fast. Confused but hopeful, I removed the SD card and put it in the Wii U to start the second half of the process.

Once things got going, I was greeted by a totally different adorable Pikmin animation (also in the link above) but noticed that the progress was moving significantly slower this time. Then I looked at the top of the screen where it shows a status message on the current item being transferred and saw that all my purchased games were showing as “Downloading” whereas save data was showing as “Transferring.” Even though I’d had to painstakingly move every individual item on my SD card back to the Wii system memory, it wasn’t copying them, it was downloading them all again anyway! That rendered that entire long, frustrating process of moving all my content from the SD card to system memory completely unnecessary! If it has to download all the games again why can’t it just analyse all the content I have on the system, transfer the licenses on Nintendo’s server and just re-download them all again anyway? There is absolutely no reason this had to work this way! NONE!

At this point, I literally said out loud “Fuck this bullshit!”, put the Wii Remote down and went to do something else and calm down while the process completed. When I came back about half an hour later, I saw an error message displayed with Nintendo’s usual cryptic numeric code that doesn’t actually tell you squat. I Googled that code and was informed it was a network timeout error. This was likely because the store servers were still swamped and since it was downloading everything again even though I had it all on the SD card, it was having issues. I hit Try Again and things continued. Half an hour later, I was greeted with another “An Error Has Occurred” message, this one with no buttons or numeric code and also a frozen Wii U. I’d read somewhere that this happened to a person and he lost the licenses to most of his content in the process. I hard rebooted the Wii U and thankfully, it realised the failure and offered to continue. I had two more “Try Again” error prompts throughout the remaining process but it never froze again. However, the entire process of re-downloading everything (which totaled less than 512MB, the size of the Wii system memory) took well over two hours. According to my router, the transfer speed rarely ever exceeded 250Kbytes/sec or to put it in simpler terms, 1/28th of the maximum speed of my Internet connection.

After all this was done, I had all the content that I’d managed to fit into the Wii’s system memory but now had 18 items to re-download. Should be easy right? Actually it is but it’s also unnecessarily arduous and frustrating, just like everything else. When you go into the Wii Store, there’s a Titles You’ve Downloaded button. The problem is, it’s an alphabetised list of everything that only displays 10 or so titles per page and it doesn’t know or tell you what you’ve already downloaded. You have to select an item, confirm you want to re-download it, tell it where to save it, confirm you want to basically “purchase” it again for no money, wait for it to download (which is slow at the best of times and barely worked at all prior to the 27th) and agree to a health and safety warning. After all that, you’re kicked back to the first screen of the Wii Shop. You can’t download content in a batch, you can’t queue up multiple items and it doesn’t even remember your place in the list of downloaded items. On top of all this, it takes about 5 seconds to switch between each page of the list and there were items on all 7 pages for me. Downloading these 18 remaining items (on the 27th when they had some semblance of available bandwidth) took over an hour.

The primary reason this took so long for me was because of the amount of content I had. I voluntarily gave Nintendo more money to buy more digital content on the Wii and as a direct result, this process took me hours when it probably took most others minutes. I would bet I’m in a very small percentile of people who bought that much digital content on that platform and that irrefutably made the process that much harder for me. People (myself included) lament how DRM only punishes legitimate consumers while doing nothing to stop piracy but this is worse than that. It proportionally causes more harm to the legitimate consumers the more content they bought. It’s completely backwards and it’s insane. Considering the Wii platform has been cracked wide open and has more rampant piracy than either of the other two consoles, this DRM has also proven a complete failure to boot. The worst part is that the longest, most frustrating steps of the process weren’t necessary at all because most of the data that was transferred was just licenses, not the games themselves! Why was this done this way? I can’t figure out a reason.

As you can tell from the title, I’m going to drop an example of exactly how you do DRM and why Nintendo has no excuse: Steam. You know how you get your Steam games on another computer? You install Steam on that computer, double-click the game you want and download it again. And if you don’t want to download it again, you copy the folder with the game from your old PC to the new one and it’s there instantly. Steam has thousands of developers working with them and all the major publishers. They are all fine with Steam’s sensible, completely reasonable way to do DRM. Both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles also do DRM far better than Nintendo. Microsoft’s could be better but it’s not this bad. There is no way that Nintendo of all companies couldn’t implement a similar style system and there is no way they were pressured from their partners to do it the way it is now.

I don’t know what entered their minds to make them think this was necessary but it’s wrong, it can be changed and it must be changed. I was super excited when I got my Wii U and I still can’t wait to crack into some games on it but this experience was so terrible and so frustrating that after it was done, I didn’t want to touch the system for the rest of the day. Combine this nightmare with the fact that Nintendo Network IDs (and eShop purchases made with them) are hard locked to the individual hardware they were created on and it makes me never want to buy a digital product from Nintendo again. It’s certainly enough to make me tell any prospective Wii U owner to stick to discs only. This type of DRM takes everything that’s bad about the concept in general and turns it up to 11.

Nintendo has a lot to prove with the Wii U and in general as a company. Dedicated consoles have a hard road ahead, Wii U perception has been mired by bad messaging and despite strong initial sales, lots of people are questioning what kind of long-term future it has. Combine this with Nintendo milking too many of their franchises too hard (even by Nintendo standards) and the company isn’t the sure bet it has been for decades. How does any company treat their most loyal and enthusiastic customers so badly in the face of competition like they’ve never seen before? I love Nintendo’s stuff and I so want them to continue to succeed but they’re either ignorant or arrogantly apathetic to the future that’s staring them in the face. They should be doing everything in their power to court their core fan base and keep them evangelizing the Wii U and 3DS. Based on my experiences with the Wii U so far, the message they sent to me was that they are either so arrogant or so apathetic towards my concerns that it doesn’t matter that I’ve bought more digital content than probably 90% of all Wii owners. Clearly the fact that I spent so much there means I’m willing to endure the headaches, either out of loyalty or because I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect the content investments I’ve made. It’s unnecessary, it’s disrespectful and it’s offensive to me as a loyal Nintendo supporter.

I admit that my case is far in the minority and most Wii U buyers will either not be affected by it at all or will have it be much easier than it was for me. But that’s the whole point: This doesn’t affect many people because no one bought digital content on the Wii. We’re entering a new digital age and people who don’t embrace it with both hands will be left behind. Things like this show me that Nintendo either doesn’t get it or is too arrogant to realise that people won’t put up with this anymore, not when systems like Steam and the various app stores (for all their many flaws) do it far better and easier.

Nintendo has more to prove right now than perhaps they ever have in their 100+ years as a company. They need to listen to their customers, particularly their hard core audience and be nimble in their responses to them. They’re doing neither right now and they no longer hold a position where they can afford to do that. Please Nintendo, please fix this and do it quickly. I want you to succeed but things like this will be the beginning of the end for you.

Business, Predictions, Video Games DRM, eShop, Nintendo, Steam, video games, Virtual Console, Wii, WiiU, WiiWare

WiiU launch day: Poor messaging and unrealistic expectations

3 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on November 19, 2012

I’m a big fan of Nintendo and their stuff but I didn’t pre-order a WiiU. This was partially for money reasons at the time but also because Nintendo’s terrible at pre-release hype. For many years, they’ve consistently held to a strategy of saying and showing very little about their upcoming stuff until very close to launch. This used to work, I don’t think it does any more. Coming out of E3, very little information on the system and its launch games were offered and much of the press and fans were left scratching their heads. I went into E3 ready to pre-order and the lack of information scared me off. As today’s launch approached, more details finally started to trickle out and I got more excited but by then, the window to pre-order had long since passed. My girlfriend and I had to do a bunch of errands in different parts of town so I decided to try to stop in at various retailers to see if I could find a Deluxe set that hadn’t been claimed. I sadly had no luck but my observations in doing so were very telling.

I haven’t had cable TV in years so I admit that I don’t fully know how Nintendo’s been promoting the WiiU to the general public. From what I understand from others, it’s not well and my experiences today would seem to confirm that. At a store, I saw a lady standing at a demo kiosk, starting at the GamePad perplexed as to what to do with it in a gaming context. In another store, I overheard the following exchange between a lady and a sales rep:

Lady: “So let me make sure I have this right. I can play Wii games on the WiiU but I can’t play WiiU games on the Wii? Is that right?”
Sales Rep: “That’s correct. The WiiU’s a new system and it’s games don’t work with the Wii because it’s older.”
Lady: “That’s really confusing.”
Sales Rep: “I agree completely.”
Lady: “Why did they use a name so similar if it’s such a different thing?”
Sales Rep: “I have no idea. It’s a good question.”

I’ve read in several places that many mainstream consumers think the WiiU is just a tablet accessory for the original Wii and not a new system that’s not only sporting an innovative new input method but also substantially better tech than the Wii and possibly even the 360 and PS3. It would appears that Nintendo is at least partially aware of this too because above every WiiU shelf I saw was a promotional banner that had “ALL NEW CONSOLE” prominently printed over the picture of the hardware. I understand that the Wii is a strong brand (though one could argue not so much any more now that the sales have collapsed) but did no one at Nintendo think people would get confused with the new system being markedly different but sharing an almost identical name? Calling it something like the “Wii 2″ implies an obvious and significant change. People knew the 3DS was different than the DS because of the 3. It was clear and obvious. WiiU doesn’t imply anything unless you have it explained and more likely shown to you. If what I saw today is any kind of indicator, Nintendo has dropped the ball there too.

A lot of people not only don’t know what the WiiU is, they don’t even know it exists. Few knew what the Wii was either back in the day but Nintendo did a masterful job of promoting not only its existence but what it did differently and why it was so cool. From what I’ve observed today, it appears that they thought one or both of the following: Firstly, that simply having the Wii branding would draw people in and secondly, that early adoption by hardcore Nintendo faithful would create word of mouth buzz, something that was instrumental in the Wii’s early success. The Wii branding seems to have only caused confusion and while it’s too early to tell on the word of mouth, I think relying on the hardcore gamers (who Nintendo alienated a lot of with the Wii) to do your early PR for you is a very dangerous gamble. Hardcore players can’t carry a platform on their own any more and drawing in the mainstream is vital. Doing something innovative like the GamePad can be a hook to draw them in but it has to be marketed big and smart. It appears they’ve done none of those things so far. If they don’t have a massive PR campaign planned for December to make everyone aware of this before Christmas, I fear this launch weekend may be the only time the system sells out.

They haven’t exactly made things easy for the press either. It wasn’t until less than two week’s from the WiiU’s launch that they even bothered to talk about its online features in any detail, particularly odd considering online and Nintendo usually can’t be said in the same sentence without bursting into laughter. To boot, said features weren’t available to the press until today (in a 5GB system update no less) and most of them seem to be kind of broken right now. The stories we saw on launch day were about how the firmware update took an hour for most people, how someone on NeoGAF tripped over a debug menu, how all the services were laggy and unreliable and how one member of the press seems to have been bit by DRM so obnoxious that his Nintendo ID might forever be bound to his work’s console. None of this had to happen and it’s only given Nintendo bad press among the circle of gamers that they are hoping will drive initial awareness for them.

On the flip side though, a lot of what we’re seeing today is completely typical for a console launch. A couple of good games, a bunch of crappy ones, some weird infrastructure hitches, oddities in the first run of hardware. All of it is normal and you can trace variants of these things to almost every hardware launch since the Super Nintendo, including the Wii. None of it’s a surprise but with a few exceptions, everyone in the press is acting shocked by these things and it’s made more than a few people call the WiiU dead on arrival. Has it been so long since we last had a major console launch that people have forgotten what launches are like? The 360 and PS3 both had largely lacking launch lineups, the 360 had hardware that barely worked and the PS3 was priced higher than most mortgage payments at the time. The Wii had Wii Sports and a bunch of shovelware garbage. The DS had similar software and a terrible hardware design. None of this should surprise anyone who covers games professionally, yet it seems to have very much, including places like Giant Bomb which are among the few enthusiast sites I consider trustworthy these days. I suspect many stories tomorrow will be talking about how down everyone is on it and how this is another sign Nintendo’s doomed and should just start making iOS games. I can appreciate that Nintendo treats the press differently than anyone else and often seems to regard them as a burden. That’s not good but I think it’s both cynical and disingenuous for press people to treat this console launch as if it’s anything other than well…a console launch.

For a company that went from Apple levels of successful to being in a bad way almost overnight, Nintendo can’t afford to screw this up. Whether we like it or not (and I very much do not), casual mainstream consumers are moving away from consoles to crappy mobile games. Many of the people who bought Wiis played Wii Sports and maybe Mario Kart Wii or New Super Mario Bros., then the machines became dust collectors. I think mobile games as they are now are an evolutionary step backwards for the gaming medium but home consoles and dedicated gaming machines in general are under more pressure than ever to stay relevant as tablets quickly approach them in power and fidelity. Nintendo is more capable than most to put up that fight and win it but they have to be smart with their messaging and so far, my impression is that they’ve blown it. The WiiU doesn’t have to (and I would argue never has a chance to) succeed like the Wii did but it can still be a big deal but that requires a lot of mainstream consumers to buy in. A lack of messaging that only ends up being confusing and counting on early adopters to drive it for you is playing with fire and I don’t think Nintendo lives in a world where it can afford to do that any more. On top of that, I think the press needs to take their expectations to a realistic level and understand that all new systems launch with quirks and that’s just the way it is. To expect different is to deny industry history and frankly, it’s just kind of dumb.

I want Nintendo and the WiiU to succeed and based on what I’ve seen, I have every intention to buy one as soon as it becomes available again. The thing is, I knew where to dig to find out what I needed to know to come to that decision. I’m not most consumers, I’m not even most gamers and people like me aren’t nearly enough to make this work. Nintendo needs to get their act together and the enthusiast press needs to remember what the real world is like. And they both need to do it fast.

Business, Coverage, Predictions, Video Games game consoles, Nintendo, video games, WiiU

The social games bubble is bursting and mobile is next

3 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on October 25, 2012

I’ve said for a long time that the explosive growth of social and mobile gaming is a fashion trend. Many a clueless analyst and click driving “journalist” has latched onto this trend as a clear and irrefutable sign that this is where all gaming is going and those who doubt it just refuse to embrace “the future”, sentiment that always makes me chuckle and roll my eyes. This does not mean I think they are going to go away or that they won’t be a major part of the gaming landscape going forward, that couldn’t be further from the truth. However, how anyone can look at the growth in both industries and say that it isn’t a bubble is either clueless or just doesn’t want to see the truth. There are many industry bubbles throughout history to refer to and this bears many of the same signs.

There has been much proof of the cracks in the bubble appearing of late but few have been as dramatic or sudden as the implosion of Zynga. They had a meteoric rise with their shovelware skinner box Facebook non-games and were reporting staggering and ballooning revenues that made many believe they’d finally cracked the nut to make gaming something everyone could get into, even when drenched in scummy business practices. It caused a gold rush of investment and many more companies to spring up in the space, few of which got the same level of attention. They quickly tried to expand into the similarly exploding mobile space, paying insanely overvalued prices for studios that had hit titles like Words with Friends and Draw Something.

Zynga quickly went public and has been cratering ever since but not before their scumbag extraordinare CEO Marc Pincus got his big pay day. From an IPO price of $10, they are now around $2.10 and their market cap is worth less than their physical assets such as real estate. They are losing money, closing studios and laying off employees, bleeding users, writing down mobile studio acquisitions made just months prior and are desperately trying to restructure themselves as an online gambling company. As is the case with most fashion trends, people got bored with what they were offering and moved on. Though Zynga is the biggest example of this, they’re also far from the only one. Lots of front line workers are now out of a job while the people who led them into oblivion are still rich. It’s the opposite of any kind of justice or fairness.

I am not a stock market analyst, I am not a professional pundit and I’m certainly not any kind of journalist so why does it feel like I’m one of the few who actually saw this coming? I certainly didn’t see it happening this fast but I was laughed at when I said this type of growth was unsustainable. When companies grow too fast, they tend to crash down hard. It’s the ones that have measured, controlled growth that tend to survive and thrive. It appears an upheaval is happening in the social games space right now, one that’s going to decimate a lot of what was quickly built, leaving behind something that will be much smaller and certainly not something that represents the future of all gaming. Many of those in charge of these companies deserve to have some hard questions asked of them but so do the analysts and press people who overhyped them and now act like they couldn’t have known this would happen. If a clueless armchair commentator like me could see it, what’s their excuse?

Make no mistake, while this may be a bubble that started to burst in the social space first, a similar reckoning is coming to the mobile games industry as well. A bazillion and one mobile studios are starting up every day and many former AAA developers are switching to mobile development, many as a means to try and survive. The AAA industry is without a doubt in a chaotic state right now but as I’ve said before, mobile is quickly becoming just as risky and hard to succeed in. It’s gone from a space where nobody could fail to a space where your cost of entry may be low but you’d almost have better financial luck buying a lottery ticket. Those who succeed either do so hugely or just well enough but the majority crash and burn. This isn’t being talked about because no big players have been affected by it yet, the same as in the social space. But make no mistake, it’s coming. A lot of hyped games will fail, a lot of studios will fold and a lot of talented aspiring developers will be left disillusioned and will give up on the craft. That’s a crime to the medium.

To be clear, while I don’t care for more social and mobile games, I’m not getting some sick sense of schadenfreude from this happening. I don’t like to see people out of work and I think the more people there are making video games of all types, the better off everyone who is into this hobby will be. However, as someone who isn’t into those forms of gaming, it has frustrated me greatly to see pundits proclaim that the types of games I love are dead, they’re no longer possible and that we either need to embrace “the future” or get out of the way. Social and mobile games will be here for the foreseeable future and that’s a good thing but they’ve started themselves off on very shaky ground, largely led by greedy businesspeople and the analysts and press puppets that propped them up and ignored valid questions that needed to be asked of them. As business does, it will adjust, adapt and what’s left will be strong and know how to thrive. But the time for meteoric growth is rapidly ending,

Ask yourself this question: Why have the majority of big publishers who have been around for decades only dipped into social and mobile gaming (yes, EA being a notable exception who is also feeling the pain right now), instead choosing to focus on their core console and PC businesses? Is it because they’re just clueless old guard types who stubbornly refuse to embrace reality and will end up in the footnotes of gaming history? Or could it be that businesspeople with a history of success saw the signs of another bubble and decided to feel things out before jumping into bed with the unknown? No one’s saying so we don’t know for sure but consider this as well: Zynga once had the financial might to buy almost any AAA publisher and now, despite EA’s stock price and market cap being a fraction of what they used to be, EA could now buy Zynga lock, stock and barrel with cash they have in the bank. That flip happened in less than a year and I think it speaks volumes.

The last few years of social and mobile’s stratospheric rise has been very interesting to watch. And the next couple of years after the bubble bursts and it begins to settle into a more sustainable model will be even more interesting.

Business, Predictions, Video Games Bigpoint, bubble, business, mobile games, social games, video games, Zynga

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